What Is A Monofocal Lens?

You can go your whole life without ever learning about monofocal lenses and get by just fine. But suddenly, you go to have your cataracts evaluated and you have to learn all this funky new lingo. But fear not, this blog post will finally unveil the curtain on what exactly is a monofocal lens.

In reality, it’s not very difficult to understand what a monofocal lens is or what it does and doesn’t do. When we correct vision for most of our life, we actually use monofocal lenses to correct a single prescription to a single distance. All the glasses and contact lenses you had in your early years are types of monofocal lenses. You didn’t notice that these lenses only focus for one distance (distance vision) because the lens inside of your eye is flexible and adjusts to cover the rest.

But as we get a little bit older, this lens inside the eye changes, becomes less flexible and starts to behave more like a monofocal lens. This lens can no longer read up close and you are forced to go into progressive glasses or use reading glasses to compensate.

This brings us to cataract surgery. In cataract surgery, your cataract is being replaced by a brand new lens. There are special lifestyle lenses that can correct distance AND reading vision. These are NOT monofocal lenses. There are also special lenses that can correct astigmatism. These actually ARE a type of monofocal lens. But most commonly, monofocal lenses refer to simple or basic lenses that don’t correct astigmatism and only correct vision at a single distance. These lenses aren’t bad, in fact for the longest time these lenses were the only option after cataract surgery. These lenses just can’t provide all the glasses independence that the other lenses provide.

So there you go! The short primer on monofocal lenses to educate you as your prepare for cataract surgery.

Also check out Your Complete Guide Of Lenses For Cataract Surgery on EyeMountain.com

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